The preacher then went on to criticise the attitude of religion towards science. "If there is still a feeling of hostility between... them ... it is no longer the fault of religion. There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea,--that idea which the church has never ceased to embody,--I AM!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocatio...n of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The first element of greatness is fundamental humbleness (this should not be confused with servility); the second is freedom from ...self; the third is intrepid courage, which, taken in its widest interpretation, generally goes with truth; and the fourth--the power to love--although I have put it last, is the rarest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting i...ncidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematis...ing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory--of the absol...ute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Beauty consists of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circum...stantial element, which will be, if you like, by turns or all together, the era, its fashion, its morals, its passions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »